JAPAN: A Blue Sky for Tokyo

Some 500 years ago the great Japanese
warrior-poet Ota Dōkan built a castle on the marshy fringes of what is
today Tokyo Bay. A bustling little town sprang up, and Ota wrote:

The abode of mine

Adjoins a pine grove

Sitting on the blue sea

And from its humble eaves

Commands a view of soaring Fuji.

Today Ota Dōkan's poem is remembered more in sorrow than anything else.
His beloved town has mushroomed into the world's most populousand
most pollutedcapital, home to 11.4 million gasping people. The fabled
pines are suffocating from smog. The blue sea is washed by tons of
noxious...